When A Blog is Not A Blog
To me, a blog in the traditional sense is written by a single author about
a specific topic. IT allows for comments by readers and features the
personal, unmediated, raw voice of the author. Scoble agrees:
Blogging being defined as “single voice of a person.”
Most of the things on the list are now done by teams of journalists —
that isn’t blogging anymore in my book. TechCrunch just hired a
professional journalist which is sort of funny cause when I started
blogging I never expected blogging to become a business, just a way to
share what was going on in my life.
The advent of the Techmeme Leaderboard has shown that very few of these traditional blogs are in the Top 100 (see my earlier post on this). A lot of the Top 100 blogs at Techmeme have more than one bloggers on their payroll. As such, they have a higher output and as
they start to hire more trained journalists the quality of the writing is, if not better, then at least consistent.
Duncan Riley at TechCrunch thinks that this is the most ridiculous thing he has ever heard:
Scoble’s argument that most of the 64% that are blogs
aren’t real blogs as they are written by more than one person is perhaps
one of the weirdest propositions I’ve heard this year. I’ll accept that
a blog is only a blog if it has comments (which they should) but since
when did a blog stop becoming a blog because there are multiple
bloggers? If anything, the strength of multiple author blogs
demonstrates the growing maturity of the blogosphere, in that to be at
the top, leading blogs have adopted to the 24/7 news cycle by bringing
in additional bloggers to cover breaking events, and to provider a
richer, and perhaps more comprehensive coverage of news events.
I would argue that these blogs, while blogs in name, are really full-blown media outfits that just tend to publish using the same tools as bloggers (WordPress, reversed chronological order, RSS etc.).
I have no problem with Duncan’s assertion that a blog can have multiple authors. However, TechCrunch isn’t really a blog anymore in the traditional sense. It doesn’t feature a personal voice anymore it used to have when it was just Mike Arrington blogging there about things he
was passionate about. Today, TechCrunch isn’t driven by the passion of the original author, but by the fact that they have to make money. Keep the advertisers happy. Organize conferences. Lots of things that bloggers normally don’t worry about, because they are in the game
because they are passionate about blogging.
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